youtube-dl (2015.05.15-1) unstable; urgency=medium Starting with Debian's version 2015.05.15-1, the handling of video formats has been revamped in youtube-dl. In particular, the option `--max-quality` doesn't exist anymore. This is likely to break scripts and/or other programs that use this option. Please, refer to the manpage (in particular to the section named "FORMAT SELECTION") for more details. -- Rogério Brito Mon, 18 May 2015 08:23:20 -0300 youtube-dl (2014.02.17-1) unstable; urgency=medium There are too many goodies that this new release brings us, including that it is possible to combine/merge/multiplex audio and video formats that Youtube now offers separately (See the previous notes about Youtube using DASH for video and audio). Now, if you want a 480p video in H.264 format, High profile, with 128kbps AAC audio (this used to be Youtube's format 35), you can specify format `-f 135+140` on the command-line, and so on. Only your imagination is the limit. See http://cynic.cc/blog/posts/2014-02-17-youtube-dl_news/ for more verbose news. -- Rogério Brito Mon, 17 Feb 2014 18:24:20 -0300 youtube-dl (2013.10.23-1) unstable; urgency=low From http://cynic.cc/blog/posts/2013-10-23-assorted_news/: [13]Some people may have noticed, others may not, but when downloading videos from Youtube, they apparently are getting more aggressive with the use of [14]Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (also called DASH) and, as a result, some (perhaps going to be all in the near future?) of the videos may not be available in the resolution/formats that you used to like (like me, with format number 35). By the way, one thing that is interesting with youtube videos provided via DASH is that they are available in different streams: one for the video and another for the audio. What does this mean in practical terms for users of youtube-dl? Well, if you wanted to download videos in resolutions like the 480p (format 35) that I mentioned, then you will probably have to change your way of doing things, until a more automated solution is in place. You will have to download both the audio and the video and, then, "combine" them (that is, multiplex them) to create one "normal" video file with both the audio and the video. I usually do this via: ffmpeg -i audio.m4a -i video.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy combined.mp4 If you prefer having a Matroska container instead of an mp4 container (which, BTW, results in smaller muxing overhead), then you can use the command line: mkvmerge -o combined.mkv audio.m4a video.mp4 Oh, those m4a and mp4 extensions are a new addition that [15]I just sent upstream (in the past, both would have been named with an extension of mp4). As, an aside, I like formats 135 for video and 140 for audio, for the reasons that I mentioned in a comments to issue 1612: Otherwise, to download 480p videos (which I do for lectures and so on with other projects of mine, like edx-dl) I have to call youtube-dl twice: once for format 135 and another for format 140, since the old (?) format 35 files are much smaller than the lower resolution 360p files (due to the former being encoded in High profile vs. the latter being encoded in Constrained Baseline profile). While this is unfortunate for some, this is a good thing for others: I once had a blind user of youtube-dl asking me if he could avoid downloading the whole video just to extract the audio, so that he save on bandwidth. Well, now this is possible. 13. https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/1612 14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic%20Adaptive%20Streaming%20over%20HTTP 15. https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/pull/1622 -- Rogério Brito Fri, 25 Oct 2013 01:25:41 -0200 youtube-dl (2010.07.22-1) unstable; urgency=medium The upstream author has removed support for the -b ("best format") and the -d ("high def") command line options. The behavior now is to download the best quality for each video. If you experience a problem with youtube-dl downloading videos that are too large, you should consider using the --max-quality option to limit which format to use. The list of formats (in decreasing quality) can be found with: grep "available_formats =" /usr/bin/youtube-dl -- Rogério Brito Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:07:03 -0300